Pure Storage CEO Sees $1B In Sales Next Fiscal Year

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All-flash storage array vendor Pure Storage on Wednesday reported that it is on its way to its first billion-dollar sales year based on the strength of its channels and on its ability to compete against Dell EMC and NetApp.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said it expects little headwind from the on-going tight supply of NAND memory, which is a key component to all-flash storage, and that it expects updates to its software to make its solution set applicable to the entire breadth of enterprise workloads.

David Hatfield, Pure Storage president, said during Wednesday's earnings conference call that Pure Storage planned to add synchronous replication and enhanced cloud data protection to the company's product line, including the FlashArray, the new FlashBlade all-flash array for unstructured data, and the FlashStack converged infrastructure solution done in conjunction with its compute and networking partner Cisco Systems.

The company also expects to start introducing the new high-performance NVMe PCIe-based non-volatile memory technology to its FlashArray line this year, according to Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of products.

Kixmoeller told analysts that the transition to NVMe would likely be more important to the storage industry, and harder to do, than the transition from traditional storage to all-flash. He said Pure Storage is leveraging its software capabilities to ensure the transition is non-disruptive.

Kixmoeller also said that synchronous replication was the last hurdle for Pure Storage to the high-end disaster recovery market. "We are confident of shipping it this year," he said.

Scott Dietzen, Pure Storage CEO, told analysts that NAND memory supplies are tight across the industry, but that his company is in better shape than competitors such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp, which recently reported impacts from the shortage.

"Keep in mind that Pure's software gives us an advantage compared to our competition," he said. "We get double the capacity from the same amount of NAND, and we can use a mix of consumer grade and enterprise technologies."

Isilon was designed at a time when the focus of unstructured data was on streaming video, while FlashBlade was designed in the age of IoT, he said. The Isilon architecture is not built for the new unstructured workloads customers are running today, he said.

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